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Submission + - Blizzard Releases In-House Design Tools To Starcraft Modders (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Blizzard has released a powerful new suite of tools for Starcraft 2 modders and developers that fundamentally change the nature of what's possible in the popular RTS game. Now, players can use the same architectural and graphics design toolsets that Blizzard has used internally to build new units, tilesets, and models. Furthermore, these tools are now available even with the Starcraft 2: Starter Edition kit. Critically, artists will now be able to incorporate images and effects designed in programs like 3ds Max, Photoshop, or other high-end particle systems. The exciting thing about these releases is that Starcraft 2's modding list is as interesting as the primary game, if not moreso. Fans have faithfully created adaptations of famous Starcraft maps, implemented entirely new rulesets that blend the old, micro-friendly playstyle of Starcraft with the modern engine, and even gone total conversion with Warcraft ported over into the SC2 game.

Submission + - Microsoft Relaxing Xbox One Kinect Requirements, Giving GPU Power A Boost? (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: News from gaming insider Pete Doss is that Microsoft is mulling significant changes to the restrictions it places on developers regarding the Xbox One's GPU. Reportedly, some 10% of total GPU horsepower is reserved for the Kinect — 8% for video and 2% for voice processing. Microsoft is apparently planning changes that would free up that 8% video entirely, leaving just 2% of the system's GPU dedicated to voice input. If Microsoft makes this change, it could have a significant uplift on system frame rates — and it's not clear that developers would necessarily need to patch the architecture to take advantage of the difference.

Submission + - Bill Gates Schooled In Chess, Beaten By 23 Year Old Grandmaster In 71 Seconds (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: There's no disputing that Bill Gates is blessed with a brilliant mind. Sure, he dropped out of Harvard College, but he got accepted into the elite institution of higher learningin the first place. Leading into his college career, Gates scored 1,590 out of 1,600 on the SAT. The rest is history — he went on to co-found Microsoft, built a net worth that's in the billions ($76.8 billion at last count), and now spends his time on his philanthropic efforts. Regardless, it took 23-year-old Magnus Carlsen, a "grandmaster" Chess player since the age of 13 and new world Chess champion, just 71 seconds to defeat Gates in a friendly game of Chess on a Norwegian television show. It takes longer to heat up a cup of water in the microwave.

Submission + - Netflix Threatens To Rally User Base To Rise Up And Save Net Neutrality (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Over the past few weeks, net neutrality has seen serious challenges from the likes of Verizon and AT&T. Verizon won a court case in which the FCC's rules on net neutrality were effectively gutted, while AT&T introduced a new pricing plan for content providers called Sponsored Data, which pushes companies like Netflix to pay an additional per-user fee to have video streams not count against that users' bandwidth. Everyone has been curious about how Netflix might respond to this, and now the company's CEO has tendered his answer in a letter to shareholders. Reed Hastings has challenged the decision to strike down net neutrality in strong terms, writing: "In principle, a domestic ISP now can legally impede the video streams that members request from Netflix, degrading the experience we jointly provide. The motivation could be to get Netflix to pay fees to stop this degradation. Were this draconian scenario to unfold with some ISPs, we would vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open Internet they are paying their ISP to deliver."

Submission + - OCZ Acquisition By Toshiba Finalized, Subsidiary Launches Vertex 460 SSD (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: In the nick of time, failing SSD manufacturer OCZ Technology is receiving an injection straight to the heart via Toshiba. After falling into bankruptcy last year and nearly instantly being rescued, Toshiba and OCZhave announced that Toshiba has "finalized the purchase of substantially all assets of OCZ Technology Group, making it a wholly owned subsidiary and Toshiba Group Company." Effective immediately, the group company will operate independently as OCZ Storage Solutions but with the help of Toshiba's NAND Flash memory manufacturing behind them. Fittingly, the first product released after the announcement features all home-grown OCZ Indilinx controller technology and 19nm Toshiba-built MLC NAND flash memory. The just announced OCZ Vertex 460 series SSD will be available soon in 120GB – 480GB flavors for as little as .75 cents per GiB for the 480GB variant. Performance-wise, the drive matches up well, offering 530MB/s read performance and about 500MB/s write performance in the benchmarks.

Submission + - Sugar Battery Breakthrough Could Run Your Next Laptop On Mountain Dew (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: A new breakthrough at Virginia Tech could be the beginning of a new type of commercial battery production. Granted, tech companies make these claims on a regular basis — but this one may be worth paying attention to in the long term. According to EurekaAlert, a research team led by Y.H. Percival Zhang has created a high-density battery capable of running on sugar instead of relying on platinum as a catalyst. Sugar, or glucose, is a remarkably good source of energy. It stores far more energy than a comparable lithium-ion battery. Its energy density is on par with ethanol (think biofuel made with corn). The key to a sugar battery is having an efficient method of releasing the energy stored in the sugar. Zhang's group claims to have made breakthroughs on this front. In this newest development, Zhang and his colleagues constructed a non-natural synthetic enzymatic pathway that strip all charge potentials from the sugar to generate electricity in an enzymatic fuel cell. Then, low-cost biocatalyst enzymes are used as catalyst instead of costly platinum, which is typically used in conventional batteries.

Submission + - AMD Considered GDDR5 For Kaveri, Might Release Eight-Core Variant (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Of all the rumors that swirled around Kaveri before the APU debuted last week, one of the more interesting bits was that AMD might debut GDDR5 as a desktop option. GDDR5 isn't bonded in sticks for easy motherboard socketing, and motherboard OEMs were unlikely to be interested in paying to solder 4-8GB of RAM directly. Such a move would shift the RMA responsibilities for RAM failures back to the board manufacturer. It seemed unlikely that Sunnyvale would consider such an option but a deep dive into Kaveri's technical documentation shows that AMD did indeed consider a quad-channel GDDR5 interface. Future versions of the Kaveri APU could potentially also implement 2x 64-bit DDR3 channels alongside 2x 32-bit GDDR5 channels, with the latter serving as a framebuffer for graphics operations. The other document making the rounds is AMD's software optimization guide for Family 15h processors. This guide specifically shows an eight-core Kaveri-based variant attached to a multi-socket system. In fact, the guide goes so far as to say that these chips in particular contain five links for connection to I/O and other processors, whereas the older Family 15h chips (Bulldozer and Piledriver) only offer four Hypertransport links.

Submission + - Ampere could be redefined after experiments track single electrons crossing chip (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Physicists have tracked electrons crossing a semiconductor chip one at a time — an experiment that should at last enable a rational definition of the ampere, the unit of electrical current.
At present, an ampere is defined as the amount of charge flowing per second through two infinitely long wires one metre apart, such that the wires attract each other with a force of 2×107 newtons per metre of length. That definition, adopted in 1948 and based on a thought experiment that can at best be approximated in the laboratory, is clumsy — almost as much of an embarrassment as the definition of the kilogram, which relies on the fluctuating mass of a 125-year-old platinum-and-iridium cylinder stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris.
The new approach, described in a paper posted onto the arXiv server on 19 December, would redefine the amp on the basis of e, a physical constant representing the charge of an electron.

Submission + - Dell Joins Steam Machine Initiative With Alienware System (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Plenty of OEMs have lifted the veil on their planned Steam Machine products but Dell really seems to want to brake free of the pack with their Alienware-designed small form factor machine that they unveiled at CES this week. It's surprisingly tiny, sleek and significantly smaller than the average game console, weighing only about 4 — 6 pounds fully configured. Dell had a prototype of the machine on hand that is mechanically exact, complete with IO ports and lighting accents. Dell also had a SteamOS driven system running, though and it was actually a modified Alienware system powering the action with Valve's innovative Steam Controller. In first person shooters like Metro Last Night, that Dell was demonstrating, the left circular pad can be setup for panning and aiming in traditional AWSD fashion, while the right pad can be used for forward and back movement with triggers setup for firing and aiming down site. You can, however, customize control bindings to your liking and share profiles and bindings with friends on the Steam network. What's notable about Dell's unveiling is that the Steam Machines initiative gained some critical mass with a major OEM like Dell behind the product offering, in addition to the handful of boutique PC builders that have announced products thus far.

Submission + - NVIDIA CES 2014: Tegra K1 Debutes With 192 GPU Cores (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA's Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at CES 2014 and after covering a number of other NVIDIA innovations over the past year, NVIDIA unveiled its latest mobile chip. Not Tegra 5 — NVIDIA appears to be dropping the five altogether — but Tegra K1 (codenamed Logan). According to Jen-Hsun, one of the advantages of the Tegra K1 chip is that it offers the same programming capabilities as the conventional NVIDIA GK104 GPU. The Unreal 4 engine will be coming to mobile as a result, which makes sense, given the new core's capability. The big news of the evening from NVIDIA was that we'd soon see two SKUs for Tegra K1 — a quad-core Cortex-A15 32-bit chip at 2.3GHz with 192 Kepler GPU cores, or a dual-core Denver core at up to 2.5GHz and a whopping seven-way superscalar architecture and that means that Denver can execute up to seven instructions simultaneously. NVIDIA was mum on a ship date for either architecture but indicated that the Denver-based chip had only just gotten back from the foundry in a useable form. So it's safe to say we won't see Denver shipping in products until the back half of the year, given typical ramp time. The 192 GPU core Kepler-based Tegra K1 with standard Cortex-A15 cores should be ready to ramp well before that.

Submission + - Computer Scientists Invents Game-Developing Computer AI (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Over the past few years, short game writing "jams" have become a popular way to bring developers together in a conference with a single overarching theme. These competitions are typically 24-48 hours long and involve a great deal of caffeine, frantic coding, and creative design. The 28th Ludum Dare conference from held from December 13 — 16 of this past year was one such game jam — but in this case, it had an unusual participant: Angelina. Angelina is a computer AI designed by Mike Cook of Goldsmiths, London University. His long-term goal is to discover whether an AI can complete tasks that are generally perceived as creative. The long-term goal is to create an AI that can "design meaningful, intelligent and enjoyable games completely autonomously." Angelina's entry into Ludum Dare, dubbed "To That Sect," is a simple 3D title that looks like it hails from the Wolfenstein era. Angelina's initial game is simple, but in reality Angelina is an AI that can understand the use of metaphor and build thematically appropriate content, which is pretty impressive. As future versions of the AI improve, the end result could be an artificial intelligence that "understands" human storytelling in a way no species on Earth can match.

Comment Re:Slashvertisement Alert!! (not) (Score 2) 107

by MojoKid (#45839919) Attached to: NVIDIA Tegra Note 7 Tested, Fastest Android 4.3 Slate Under $200
The product was released at the end of NOVEMBER and is just now getting out to retail. No need to shout that. And just because an article here speaks to a product's salient features (both good and not so good - lest you forget the lower res display was mentioned too) doesn't make it an advertisement.

Submission + - NVIDIA Tegra Note 7 Tested, Fastest Android 4.3 Slate Under $200 (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA officially took the wraps off of its Tegra Note mobile platform a few weeks back. If you’re unfamiliar with the Tegra Note, it’s a 7”, Android-based tablet, powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 SoC. The Tegra Note 7 also marks NVIDIA’s second foray into the consumer electronics market, with an in-house designed product; NVIDIA's SHIELD Android gaming device was the first out of the gate earlier this year. Though Tegra Note 7 on the surface may appear to be just another 7-inch slate, sporting a 1280X720 display, it does have NVIDIA's proprietary passive stylus technology on board, very good sounding speakers and an always on HDR camera. It's also one of the fastest Android tablets on the market currently, in the benchmarks. Unlike in NVIDIA's SHIELD device, the Tegra 4 SoC is passively cooled in Tegra Note 7 and is crammed into a thin and light 7" tablet form factor. As a result, the SoC can't hit peak frequencies quite as high as the SHIELD (1.8GHz vs. 1.9GHz), but that didn't hold the Tegra Note 7 back very much. In a few of the CPU-centric and system level tests, the Tegra Note 7 finished at or near the head of the pack, and in the graphics benchmarks, its 72-core GeForce GPU competed very well, and often allowed the $199 Tegra Note 7 to outpace much more expensive devices.

Submission + - Rise Of The Super High Res Notebook Display (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Mobile device displays continue to evolve and along with the advancements in technology, resolution continues to scale higher, from Apple's Retina Display line to high resolution IPS and OLED display in various Android and Windows phone products. Notebooks are now also starting to follow the trend, driving very high resolution panels approaching 4K UltraHD even in 13-inch ultrabook form factors. Lenovo's Yoga 2 Pro, for example, is a three pound, .61-inch thick 13.3-inch ultrabook that sports a full QHD+ IPS display with a 3200X1800 native resolution. Samsung's ATIV 9 Plus also boast the same 3200X1800 13-inch panel, while other recent releases from ASUS and Toshiba are packing 2560X1440 displays as well. There's no question, machines like Lenovo's Yoga 2 Pro are really nice and offer a ton of screen real estate for the money but just how useful is a 3 or 4K display in a 13 to 15-inch design? Things can get pretty tight at these high resolutions and you'll end up turning screen magnification up in many cases so fonts are clear and things are legible. Granted, you can fit a lot more on your desktop but it begs the question, isn't 1080p enough?

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